Rob Horning, on “the emergent way of seeing” encouraged by generative AI:

No one is entitled to a unique experience, or at least to a unique representation of it. The photo that one takes of some event doesn’t belong to the picture taker; it belongs to the “field of what is representable,” which once was the shared possession of an entire culture but is becoming the property of AI companies, who are trying to turn that field into a closed, proprietary model. Then, every image you take of “your” experience will be quickly demonstrated to be derived from an existing idea already latent in the total model of all possible experiences. […]

[We end up with] the sense that “a model could have generated this” whether it had or not. It projects a subjectlessness onto a scene, subtracts the specific intentionality from any point of view, and sees the average, the predictable, the over-seen, exalted into a kind of glossy, mediocre sublime. No one is missing out on anything. Behind everything distinctive is an ordinary pattern if you scale up enough. And that is the scale at which tech companies want us to situate our consuming selves, where we plug into a feed not to “connect with people we know” — a local and financially inconsequential level that can only sustain so much time on device, and which is readily revealed as an inadequate substitute for better and more secure ways of keeping in touch — but to connect with the machine and to learn how to see the way it sees and enjoy its endless bounty.